[snrplfth]

The point is that if the robot really is that fast, and that cheap, then you don't compete - you start doing something else where the robot cannot compete at that price. Textile workers aren't robots - they have the capacity to shift to other work, and there's an enormous amount of work to be done.

This objection to automation has been brought up every time anything's been invented, for hundreds of years - if we do something with less human labour, then humans won't have work or incomes. But actually, they just end up finding other useful things to do that weren't getting done before.

[sqeaky]

I don't think this is the same argument that has been made hundreds of times. That argument is about the west. Here in the USA we could in theory train our coal miners to write software or build build bridges or do some other useful task.

China has way more people and much less ability to train them, but that is not 0 ability to train them. But Bangladesh... They are pretty fucked. This will cut them out of a huge swath of the economy they were participating in yesterday. You can't efficiently make roboticists in Bangladesh today.

EDIT - I also think complete automation is fundamentally different than performance enhancing tools. Clearly Bangladesh has sewing machines, but that is an entirely different price and profit category than a full blown sewing robot.

[snrplfth]

This is exactly the same argument that has been made hundreds of times. "Oh, they're simple peasants now and forever, they can't work in factories, they'll never learn to read, they can't invent productive industries" and so on.

You seem to be implying that training for jobs is somehow something that's done mainly by the governments of countries - that people are just passive receptors of whatever training and education the state can provide, and can't seek it out, or create it for themselves. This is of course wholly wrong, and almost none of the specialized skills developed by people in the course of industrialization are gained through formal education.

You don't have to make lots of roboticists in Bangaldesh anyways (and there aren't many of those in industrialized economies either) - people can and will move into the sectors that have been small simply because labour was more valuable elsewhere - services, like health care, education, retail, et cetera. These are useful tasks no less than textile work, and largely don't require a massive "training program".